HDR with a raw file

okay, so i started playing around with HDR panoramas... like on a simple scene where a beach falls off into the lake. take a shot of the lake and a shot of the beach, each independantly exposed, and then join them with photoshop. use the properly exposed areas to cover each of their under/over exposed areas.

then i tried to do it with exposure braketing, got a little harder. so i just went outside today and took a nice RAW image of my view over the pool and nice cloudy sunset. of course, the sky is decently exposed, but the other buildings are underexposed.

i used DPP to save two seperate .jpg images which contain a sky and foreground properly exposed. what is a good process to combine these two images to create a nice HDR image? right now i have the light layered over the dark, and the only idea that comes to mind is to start using the magic wand and delete key...!!!